Letter Recognition & walking practice!

This is something I did with my first born Paddy, but with animals and words. When Paddy was about 1 and a half years old, my mom and I sewed up some alphabet pillows for him and it was incredible how much it indirectly taught Paddy his letters (as well as exercise his memory skills.) At the moment, my little one (Hunter) has absolutely no interest in the pillows so I thought I’d try something different.

At 10 months, my newest little guy was showing me he understood some words by looking at the object I would mention to him. I could say, “Where’s the cat?”and he would turn and look straight at the family cat Reggie. It’s so amazing how fast babies learn new things!

So I thought, why not start him off looking at some letters now?

He is wobbly on his feet, so a major thing I’ve been focusing on is getting him to practice walking towards exciting new things. I took some printer paper, ripped it in half and with Paddy’s Crayola Markers I drew a large brightly colored “A” “B” and “C” and simply taped it to the wall in Hunter’s play corner. It’s so simple and costs barely anything to make! (Notice how I spread them out, so he can focus on each individually and not get distracted by another letter)

The new bright “things” on the wall was incentive enough to get Hunter to quickly crawl right over and stand up. (yay! he’s finally standing up and balancing!!)

Instantly he started banging on it and touching the letter. As he did that, I repeated the letter name “A” “A” “A” so he understood the correspondence.

Also, please pardon the diaper, this August has been a scorcher 🙂

Later I tested him while he was doing something else and asked, “Hunter, where is A?” and he turned his head and looked at the letter.

babies are awesome.

Some people say that it’s better to teach lowercase letters to children first, because most of the text that we read in books and signs are in lowercase. I totally agree with that, so you can try lowercase letters if you want! I taught Paddy the uppercase letters first and he was easily able to understand later that the “big letters” have “baby letters” that look a little different. But whichever you decide to use, your child is learning something!

In addition to introducing the name of the letter, a friend of mine suggested an awesome idea… (I love when we can all work together in teaching our children & share ideas) That I teach letter sounds instead of names to get a head start on phonics. She introduced me to a homeschooling resource called The Institute for Excellence in Writing. Through their program,  the first letters they teach are “a, o, and c”. To a child who’s never been introduce to lowercase letters, they all look similar because they are round, but they all have different sounds. She explained to me how the IEW teaches them  “..angry letter ahhhh, sad letter “o” (like hot “awww”), and happy letter c (cookie)”

I think it’s a great idea to teach the name and sound of the letter simultaneously, just like we teach our kids “CAT” we always teach them to associate the sound “MEOW”. Why not with the letters?

I BEG YOU to try this with your littlest ones. It’s never to early to expose letters to children. It’s not being forward, they really do ENJOY looking at and exploring new things at this age. When it comes time to reading, your baby won’t even have to think twice. He or she will just know it and easily as he or she knows what a cat looks like and that a cat says “meow”.

Have fun playing curiously and keep challenging those little minds!

❤ sheena

Have a reluctant reader? Try this: Act it out!

My son is 3 and he can read.

I read to him all the time, but I want him to practice as well. He used to be very reluctant and now he just reads on his own.

This is one “trick” (Hmm, I wouldn’t call it a trick, because it is so much fun. Technique?) that I used in order to give him an incentive to keep reading..

He loves the book “Harry the Dirty Dog”, by Gene Zion. Before I read it to him, I said, “Hey Paddy, wanna try something new this time?!” and my enthusiasm triggered an “OK SURE!!!!!”

I said, “How about, I read this book to you and you pretend to be Harry and do everything Harry does in the book…Does that sound like fun? You have to listen and pay attention though. ”

And Paddy was sooo excited to act like a dog. hahaha.

And I read to him, stopping at times to let him act out the scenes, rolling over, barking, digging…

and after the book was done, I said, “Ok, can I try it now?” He looked at me like “WHAAH?!”

The idea that Mama was going to be silly and roll around like a dog was the best incentive for him to grab that book and read it all himself.

So there you go! Another fun game you can play with your child with no messy paint, nothing to build, nothing to buy, just using those wonderful books you have in your house!!!

 

Have fun with your little readers!!! ❤

Alphabet Maze!

I made these fabric alphabet pillows when Paddy was less than a year old, and we are STILL finding more fun ways to play with them! I came up with this idea when I saw Paddy doing a Dot-to-Dot puzzle in his dry erase book, with a mess of alphabet pillows laying on the floor next to him (because I was showing them to my 4 month old, Hunter) and Voila! a new game was born. It was such a hit with Paddy because, well, he’s 3 and loves to step on things. And he had just discovered alphabet dot-to-dot puzzles, so he was excited to be IN the puzzle.

You probably won’t have alphabet pillows like this, but you might have foam bath letters or alphabet magnets at home. (stay posted, I plan to make ABC pillow sets like this for sale in the near future!). I didn’t just dump the letters on the floor here, I scattered them around so consecutive letters were within his stepping distance. I suppose you can try dumping the letters all out and have your kid leap to the next letter…but that depends on what your letters are made out of and if that’s safe or not, or course.

Rules are simple, have your child start with the letter A and wind his or her way though the maze to get to letter Z without touching the floor or touching a wrong letter. If your child has a good grasp of what the letters look like, but can’t yet fully sing the alphabet song on his or her own, go ahead and sing it for him and do a long pause in your singing until he says the next letter.

And what little kid hasn’t innately played “the ground is lava” before?

Stepping on “L” to “M”

Paddy played this a few times, laughing, falling over and really having fun with it. I am always overjoyed when my game idea experiments go well with him. 😉 Letters are so much more fun when they’re OFF the paper.

For our youngest little ones: Does your younger child need practice with his letter recognition? You can line them up in order in a straight line and have them walk the bridge, saying the letters as they step on them.

For an alternative way to play: Focus on letter recognition by calling out letters randomly and having your child jump to them. You can put them on a short time limit and make them think and search a little bit faster. challenge those little brains!

Overall, it’s a great way to learn the alphabet and burn some energy, indoors.

 

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Pretend Play: Postman

Like most kids, Paddy has a zoo of stuffed animals at home. I was addressing some envelopes one morning and looked over at his animals and thought of this really silly idea for a reading game.

I know Paddy likes Hide & Go Seek so I thought, why not turn it into a reading game? I grabbed a stack of envelopes on my desk and started addressing them as each animal’s home. (Both my boys were taking a nap and maybe i put way too much sugar in my coffee, but I was seriously cracking myself up as I was coming up with these.)

(You know your child’s reading level best. If yours is just learning how to read, your can just write “the kitchen” or “on the bed” to help him or her focus only on a few words at a time. )

Then I placed all the animals at their respective addresses. 🙂 At the same time, smiling & thinking, “oh Paddy is going to love this”.

and just waited until Paddy woke up from him nap.

I gave him all the “mail” that needed to be delivered. I didn’t explain the rules too much with him because I really wanted him to figure out what to do with the mail. All I said was “Paddy, today you’re going to pretend to be the Postman and here is the mail you have to deliver.” And he looked at what was written on the envelope, and read it.

“Baby Bear…under Mama’s desk…” he looked at me, then looked over at my desk…saw Baby Bear sitting right underneath my desk and he understood the game.

Let your child struggle a bit, you can say “an address is a description of where someone lives”. And then tell them what a postman does, “A Postman or Mailman brings mail to a person by reading the address written on the envelope” (or something like that.) “Today you are going to be the postman and deliver the mail to all your animal friends! but we have to figure out where they all live first!”

He laughed so hard when he read where Monkey was living. The goal of the game for me! 🙂

After all the mail was delivered, Paddy wanted to play again. I didn’t have time to make addresses for more of his animals but he was happy to simply extend the game so he could “set it up” this time. Meaning, put all the animals back to their “houses” by re-reading the mail or by remembering where they all were.

Although it took a bit of preparation to put this game together, it was so fun and I was surprised that he was able to read all the addresses on his own. Maybe next time Paddy and I can spend some time writing short letters to each animal and put them in the envelopes for the next time we play this game 🙂 Or make Postcards, so I can keep my envelopes for all my grownup stuff.

Animal sight word game for beginning walkers!

I remember when Paddy just started walking, I put some stickers up on the walls of his playpen of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Minnie Mouse, just for his viewing pleasure. Somehow he caught onto their names and whenever I would ask, “Where’s Donald Duck?” Paddy would walk over and touch the Donald Duck sticker. This was before he could speak a single word, but i realized he knew exactly what I was saying.

I really liked playing this with him, but I didn’t have any more stickers, so I made my own. I drew some pictures of animals (as I love to do) and underneath, in big bold letters, I wrote the animal name below it. You can even print out pictures of animals instead of drawing them! I would recommend writing the word in lowercase letters, so there is more of a shape to the words… and I think lowercase letters are much better to learn before uppercase since most words are written in lowercase letters … just my thoughts.

Something like this:

I posted them at Paddy’s eye level on different walls of the living room and started playing that game with him. “Paddy? Where’s the tiger?” and he would walk all the way to the other side of the room to touch the tiger. To me, it was a great way to get him some walking practice!!

Later I found out that during all the times he looked at those pictures, he was also recognizing and associating the words.

Simply showing him the word without the picture “LION” and “TIGER” I could ask, “Which word is tiger?” and he would point at the word! Children are amazing.

Now, I realize this is not reading, but just recognition of the word as a sight word…but sight words are the first step to reading and makes it a whole lot easier for a kid to figure out how to read later on.

This is the best game I played with Paddy when he was very young and I really want to share it with all of you. I promised myself I would do this again with Hunter when he starts walking.

-Sheena